The staccato sound of the shots echoed from the factory walls. From the loft of the livery stable the pigeons swirled up into the sunshine, then wheeled over the Hampton House. At the end of the wooden fence, almost at the crossing, Jimmy Bostock turned to see Berardelli doubling up and the gunman firing. Parmenter was walking jerkily across the street, and Bostock did not realize the paymaster had been hit until he began to sag. Seeing him fall, Bostock took a few steps toward him, but as he did so the man in the cap froze him by the fence with two shots.
The touring car churned along the street, sputtering and skipping, the driver furiously working the spark lever on the steering wheel. Berardelli had managed to get to his hands and knees. Before the car stopped a man, crouched on the running board, sprang off near the brick pile. He had an automatic in his hand. Stepping to the swaying Berardelli, he fired point-blank. Berardelli collapsed in the gravel. The first two bandits had piled into the back seat with the cashboxes. After firing several shots at the upper factory windows, the third bandit climbed in the back seat after them. As the car whined toward the crossing he crawled over into the front seat, leaning out, pistol in hand.
Wade was just snapping the lock on the gas pump when he heard the noise and looked up the street, thinking the Italians had started a fight. He saw Parmenter drop behind the cart and then watched a wavy-haired man shoot at Berardelli.
Along the front of each floor of Rice & Hutchins were nine rows of frosted-glass windows. Even if the sash of the middle cutting-room window on the first floor had not been jammed several inches above the sill, the cutters at their benches might still have heard the shots above the noise of the machinery. The jammed window made this certain. At the sound William Brenner leaned forward from his cutting board to peer through the slit, as did Louis Pelser on his right. As they looked down they saw Berardelli writhing in the gutter almost directly below them and a man with a pistol standing over him. Afterward they found it difficult to remember just what or how much they had seen in that one glimpse. As Pelser later testified, “We seen a glance of the whole thing.” From behind them Peter McCullum sprang on top of the bench, kicking the cutting boards aside and throwing the window up to the sash. What he saw was a dark man pushing a box in a car with his right hand. The sunshine was flickering on a whitish pistol in his left hand.
“Duck!” McCullum yelled, “There’s shooting going on!” Another shot echoed, and there was a tinkle of broken glass. McCullum, Brenner, Pelser, and the rest of the cutters threw themselves on the floor under the benches. A few seconds later a cutter at the other end of the room shouted that the automobile was crossing the tracks. They crawled out from under the benches, and Pelser pushed down to the end of the room where someone had opened the last window. He managed to see only the rear of the car jolting over the tracks but he could still make out the license plate. Going back to his cutting board he wrote down the number: 49783.
From the treeing room on the floor above, the foreman, Edgar Langlois, glanced incredulously down at the slumped Berardelli and the two strangers. “Someone’s been shot!” he shouted and ran for the wall telephone in the corridor. Barbara Liscomb peered from the window to see the paymaster and his guard on the ground, and just below her a dark, short, hatless man with a pistol in his hand. As she looked, he lifted his head and stared directly at her, a face that she could never afterward get out of her mind. He pointed his pistol, but before the bullet crashed through the pane over her head she had fainted. Langlois, dashing back, looked out again to see the dark car rolling toward the crossing. The glass had been removed from the back window and a rifle or shotgun barrel was sticking through the opening.
In the Slater & Morrill lower factory Minnie Kennedy and Louise Hayes had gone upstairs to the ladies’ room. When they heard the shots they dashed to the window just in time to catch a glimpse of the vanishing car.
From the kitchen of the frame house in back of the excavation Annie Nichols, so startled that she could hardly breathe, had watched the shooting, seen Berardelli and Parmenter fall, and the laborers scatter and dodge toward her fence. Then the touring car appeared and a man tossed the cashboxes into it. In his house next door Maurice Colbert, a carman for the railroad, had just gone into the kitchen to take off his coat when he heard the shots and saw the Italians running. He started for the front door only to find that his wife, sensing trouble, had locked it and removed the key. All he could see from the window was the auto and the two men with boxes running toward it.
As the car approached the railroad crossing, it came so close to Bostock that he could have reached out and touched it. Levangie, washing the windows of his shack, had heard the shots without heeding them until he saw a man come out from behind the brick pile and commence shooting. At that very moment the warning bell began to ring for the Brockton train, and he left his cloth and bucket to crank down the gates. Just as he brought the bars horizontal the touring car came to a halt in front of him, a man leaning out with a pistol that he jerked up sharply, shouting “Up! Up!” The train was still beyond the Hood Rubber Works, the engine just rounding the bend. Again the man jerked the pistol, then pointed it. Levangie raised the barrier. The touring car jolted across the ties, passing within a few feet of Roy Gould on his way to the factories with his razor-blade paste. A bareheaded gunman fired at Gould almost point-blank, the bullet piercing a lapel of his overcoat. Gould fixed the man’s look in his mind: the blown wavy hair, the blue suit, and oddly enough the watchchain that he was wearing across his waistcoat.
Mary Splaine and Frances Devlin from their Hampton House office, Mark Carrigan from the cutting room above, watched the topheavy car with its flapping curtains as it crossed from the tracks to the cobbler’s shop on the corner. The gunman in the front seat was firing at random. Workers scurried out the side entrance of Rice & Hutchins. Someone was chasing up the street from the factory calling “Stop them! Stop them!” A railroad gang working beside a sandpile stood gaping, their shovels still in their hands, Angelo Ricci, the foreman, trying to keep them back.